


A star to steer you by

by Aegir



Series: Those who fight Monsters [4]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-16
Updated: 2014-12-16
Packaged: 2018-03-01 16:30:57
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,143
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2779976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aegir/pseuds/Aegir
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve Rogers is not happy with the new SHIELD.  He's even less happy with the history of the old one</p>
            </blockquote>





	A star to steer you by

**Author's Note:**

> Angst lover that I am, I spent a long time looking for a story which handled Steve angsting after he found Peggy had been willing to work with Zola, and ended up writing my own. For more on my take on this angle see the end notes.

“I told Fury no salvage jobs,” Steve willed himself not to tighten his grip on the phone. He’d broken them that way before. “I stand by that.”

“We want to get back to the roots of SHIELD.”

Steve knew he should be glad Phil Coulson was alive. He certainly didn’t wish Coulson dead, and he hoped like hell it would lift some of the guilt Barton’d been carrying. Mostly though he was too busy being angry because here was something else Fury had compartmentalized, despite what the guilt was doing to Barton, and here Fury was trying to rebuild SHIELD when even his own number two had agreed it had to go. Steve should have known Fury had given in way too easy.

“The roots of SHIELD are as rotten as the rest, Coulson.” He didn’t shout. The Steve Rogers who weighed 98 pounds had shouted plenty, but Captain America tried not to, because when you tower over most people it’s too much like browbeating, and Coulson couldn’t see him right now but he shouldn’t form bad habits. “You can’t grow something healthy when the roots are sick. There were good people in SHIELD, but they were in a warped system. Leave it trashed.”

“Captain, it would mean a lot to my team to have your support,” Coulson sounded polite and earnest, and Steve badly wanted to shake him until his teeth rattled. “Our aim is to return to the ideals of Agent Carter’s time. The way SHIELD should have stayed.”

Steve flinched. “Coulson, the SHIELD you’re talking about never existed. HYDRA was there from the start. There’s no idealism in hiring an unrepentant war criminal.” He was going to start yelling in a minute, he knew it. “I can’t stop you, short of physical violence, and I won’t do that. But there’ll be blizzards in the Sahara before you get my support.” He severed the connection savagely, and after a moment’s consideration, punched the wall.

An hour later Steve had a wet cloth on his healing knuckles, and was reading through old files on his laptop. Sam thought his constant trawling through the mess of SHIELD and HYDRA files was morbid, and some part of Steve admitted Sam was probably right. Most of the time he wasn’t following leads, or trying to track down anything in particular, but he kept on. It wasn’t like he needed much sleep, so he might as well spend his time doing this as spend it on Wikipedia.

The government had moved fast to take the files down, but unauthorized copies of many of them were still circulating. More important to Steve, Tony Stark had copied the entire unwieldy intelligence dump onto one of his own servers, and given Steve full access. Tony was trawling too, he called Steve sometimes at odd hours, outraged by something else he’d found. Stark Industries had been riddled with HYDRA, and Tony had taken it hard; taken the discovery that his technology would have been used to kill countless people, at least one a personal friend, harder still. “I thought I’d cleaned up my act,” he’d said once, with fathoms of bitterness. It was in those late night calls that Steve had first started to think of Tony Stark as a friend, rather than an occasional and unpredictable ally. They’d all been used.

Steve’s compass was in a drawer, just a few feet away, the picture of Peggy still intact in the lid. It was amazing the picture had survived seventy years in the ice, Steve remembered wondering if that was some kind of sign. He’d been so desperate for something to grasp on to, those first weeks, a stranger in a strange time, longing to go home. When he’d learned Peggy had been one of the founders of SHIELD it had felt like she was showing him the way. Showing him the right path as she had in a muddy field in Italy and a wrecked bar in London.

The file on his laptop was just regular bureaucracy. An old one, but it seemed someone at SHIELD had decided old staff records should be scanned into the new computers if their rank was high enough, and this man had ranked high by the time his pension was signed off. A generous one, though he hadn’t collected it long. There’s nothing Steve hadn’t already known except the precise pension figures, but he still spent too much time staring at the signature. M. Carter. Peggy had told him once other girls used to call her Magna Carta at School.

It had been eerie, seeing Peggy’s picture on the wall of the bunker at Camp Lehigh, but also reassuring. He was revisiting the place that had birthed Captain America, and it was only right that Peggy’s image should be there, to remind him to stand by what was right. He’d been enraged when he found HYDRA hidden in the basement, defacing Peggy’s legacy. Then he’d learned HYDRA had not come as a thief in the dark, but through the front door, under the thinnest of disguises. If Peggy had been forty years younger, maybe even twenty, Steve would have gone to her and demanded answers as soon as he was on his feet again. She would have faced him squarely, Agent Carter never backed down. He could have insisted she tell him why.

Steve never claimed to have clean hands. Outgunned and outnumbered the Commandos had fought dirty. Even when he took the plane down Steve had known there were injured men alive in the hold, men who would have no chance to survive. But there was compromise, and there was capitulation. What in the name of all that was holy had justified SHIELD hiring a major war criminal?

It was too late for him to know what Peggy would have answered. He’d tried to picture her telling him that Zola had seemed repentant, that everyone deserves a second chance. Steve didn’t believe a man who treated human beings like moths on pins could change, and he’d have given up the serum before he worked with Zola; still, belief in redemption, that would have been something. It didn’t ring true. He couldn’t picture Colonel Phillips being moved by pleas of repentance. He doubted Peggy would have been.

Steve had never spoken to Zola. He’d kept as much distance as he could from the man when the Commandos had brought him in, because he knew he was one move away from murdering a prisoner. Catching Zola’s windpipe in his hand and squeezing; punching him hard enough to shatter his skull and snap his neck; he had wanted Zola dead far more violently than he’d ever wanted Red Skull dead.   He knew Zola had tortured Bucky, that it was Zola who had left his dearest friend grim and haunted, refusing point-blank to see a doctor or to go near Howard’s lab though he’d once been fascinated by the man’s inventions, up far too early day after day but insisting he was fine. Zola had done all that, and Steve had been desperate to bring Zola down in return. So desperate that he had come up with a stupid, far too reckless, plan to seize the man, and Bucky had done what he always did: stepped in to save Steve Rogers from his own idiocy.

He had sworn not to stop until HYDRA was destroyed, but then he’d found himself on a plane headed to New York, and there’d been no time left to finish his vow. He’d gone over it again and again these last few weeks. At the time it had seemed the right thing, but if he hadn’t done that, if he’d found a way to land it – perhaps he could have stopped HYDRA’s regrowth before it started. Made sure Zola went to trial, instead of being given a new laboratory. Perhaps he could even have found Bucky before HYDRA tortured everything from him.

Steve had thought he was honouring Bucky, when he took the plane down. Instead he’d failed him yet again. He trusted Phillips and Howard and above all Peggy to finish HYDRA for him. He’d gone on trusting them when he woke up and found he’d slept nearly seven decades, a modern Rip van Winkle. He’d learned about the war crimes trials, assumed Zola would have faced one.   The man had experimented on POWs.   Murdered them. How could Steve have imagined SHIELD would give him a lab and a salary?

He should have looked it up, all the same. Just as he should have asked himself what Zola had done to Bucky, instead of pushing the thought away, telling himself the speed with which Bucky had recovered meant it couldn’t be as bad as he’d first thought.   Just as he should have confronted all the things about SHIELD that didn’t sit right long before Fury told him about Project Insight. It had to be faced: in some ways Captain America was a coward.

He’d been going to ask Peggy to marry him, after the war. He hadn’t quite dared to lay plans, hadn’t wanted to jinx his hopes by assuming she’d say yes.   There’d been a nagging voice telling him she was out of his league, and not because of her looks, at least not mostly. He’d looked up to Peggy before he’d loved her. Admired her courage, her strength, her determination to carve the path she wanted and not be confined by what others thought she should be. Not long after Steve came out the ice SHIELD’s PR division had got him to give an interview, and when asked who his heroes were he’d given an honest answer, not realizing yet people only wanted answers from Captain America, not Steve Rogers. His mother and Peggy Carter. They hadn’t printed it.

She’d distilled so many qualities he’d wanted for himself. It was no accident he’d had her picture in his compass instead of his wallet. She’d been more than beloved in his eyes; she’d been his guide, his inspiration, his lodestar. After the ice as well as before; when he’d felt lost, no longer able to see what path was the right one, he’d gone to Peggy even though she cried almost every time because for her it was almost always the first time since 1945, even then he’d still thought she could guide him.

Peggy had tried to tell him, he realized now. She had always been braver than he was. _I’m afraid we rather messed it up._ He had brushed it off, assumed she meant the generation that had survived the war in general. He knew better now. Peggy couldn’t have known how HYDRA had wormed its way into every part of SHIELD, but she must have seen or guessed or felt that a wrong turn had been taken somewhere along the way. He should go back, sometime soon, go back, and if she still remembered let her tell him again, and listen. Not because it was likely to get him his answers, not with her mind so fragile, but if she wanted to tell him it was only right to let her.

So many people had put their faith in Captain America. Nobody seemed to think maybe Steve Rogers needed someone to put his faith in. But perhaps it had never been fair to put that on her. Peggy had never claimed to be any kind of moral guide. She’d been strong and smart and unafraid to go after what she wanted, all that had been true. It wasn’t fair to blame her because Steve had had thought she would be just as straight and unyielding in everything she did. He’d come to terms with Fury’s treating the standards Steve tried to live by as some kind of optional extra. He could come to terms with Peggy having done the same.

Steve had learned to do without a lot of things since he woke up from the ice, there’d been no choice. He could learn to live without a compass.

When the phone rang he picked it up hoping it was Tony and not Coulson. A good rant against HYDRA would be welcome.

“Did you know?” Three words only, but enough for him to know the voice. Steve almost dropped the phone.

“Bucky,” he breathed. He thought of saying ‘How did you get this number?’ Then knew he didn’t care.

“When you were working for SHIELD.” Bucky’s voice was flat, almost toneless, as it had been on the roadway. “Did you know Zola was theirs?”

“No!” Steve said, words spilling over each other. “No, I didn’t know what had happened to Zola, I’d never have worked for them if I’d known it. I swear it, Buck. I didn’t know.”

A second’s pause, then Bucky said simply, “Thank you.”

“Wait – ” Steve began, but the line was already dead.

**Author's Note:**

> To get this clear: I like Peggy, and I like Peggy and Steve together. I also think CA:TWS suggests Peggy was a more complicated, morally ambivalent character than was apparent in CA:TFA, where she was mostly seen through Steve’s eyes. That she must at least have gone along with SHIELD hiring Zola provides grounds for reading her as a lot closer in outlook to Nick Fury than Steve Rogers. I also think that, though she was good for Steve, there are grounds for thinking he pedestalised her in ways she didn’t encourage or necessarily realise, and that it would diminish her importance to Steve not to have him rocked when he realises she made choices he couldn’t have endorsed. 
> 
> I suspect the Agent Carter series will give us a straightforwardly heroic Peggy, but I find it interesting to explore an alternative view.


End file.
